What is the workaround for Medtronic Carelink Ubuntu compatibility?

Question

I am taking a wild shot here: I am a type 1 diabetic who is going on the Insulin pump. Unfortunately, the Medtronic Carelink USB device that uploads data from the pump online only has windows drivers. Has anybody managed to get this working under Ubuntu using Wine or by any other method?

lsusb yields:

Bus 001 Device 014: ID 0a21:8001 Medtronic Physio Control Corp. MMT-7305WW [Medtronic Minimed CareLink]

I really don't want to buy a Windows machine just for this, but it's probably one in a million that somebody else has managed to make this work under Linux.

Answer 1

You will not be able to run any windows driver via wine. There is a slim chance that the device is actually compatible with something else. For example I have many factory equipment which can be connected to as if it is a modem, via minicom. However, finding this out is tricky and can be answered only by the guy who knows how this medical things are built. You can install Windows as an application via VirtualBox. However, if you are licencse-aware, microsoft prohibits it.

Answer 2

It is possible to log in to the website if you spoof your headers.

1. To do this you install a plugin like Modify Headers 0.7.1.1
2. Click Preferences
3. Select Headers -> Modify
   Headername: user-agent
   Headervalue: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0)
4. Start the plugin

Now you can log in to the site from Ubuntu to generate reports and stuff.

Answer 3

With the lsusb output above, you can use linux software, written in python or node, to talk fetch logs from your pump.

You didn't specify exactly what you are trying to do, but if you want to fetch information from the pump and save it in, eg a json file, you can use the mm-latest.py script to do that in Ubuntu.

To create a serial device, insert.sh from the decoding-carelink package Which runs:

#Bus 002 Device 011: ID 0a21:8001 Medtronic Physio Control Corp. 
sudo modprobe --first-time usbserial vendor=0x0a21 product=0x8001

Now any linux tool of your choice can talk to the pump, so long as it knows how to use the pump's protocol. There is some software available to do this:

openaps

There's a tool called openaps. This provides a number of commands, replete with tab-completion.

Installing:

# install openaps from pypi
sudo easy_install -ZU openaps

Now we can create a new instance of openaps, and begin using the devices we'll configure:

openaps init my.openaps # creates new subdirectory/git repo called my.openaps
openaps device add pump medtronic AABBCC # where AABBCC is your serial number
openaps use pump read_clock # to read current clock
openaps use pump iter_pump 100 # for last 100 pump records
openaps use pump -h # for menu of all commands

The system will also aide in storing the results to files tracked by the git repo.

decoding-carelink

Under the hood openaps is using decoding-carelink to talk to the pump. This is like a curl and libcurl for medtronic pumps, it exposes a python library for getting data from the pumps, as well as some useful commandline tools to do common tasks, such as retrieving logs from specified time period. There are also some udev rules provided to help create the serial device automatically..

comlink2-uart

• in node js, comlink2-uart provides javascript bindings for similar purposes

Once you get the data, you can use your favorite visualization program to share or visualize the data.

So the alternatives to windows and carelink software are the these two projects, which liberates your data on your own terms.

Answer 4

My girlfriend she has the carelink usb too. It really is an annoying thing. The Internet Explorer is mandatory and therefore Windows, just to run a Java (sic!) application ...

And if it weren't such an important thing, this little stick and this tiny pump. One could try to find out the settings of the hardware through which the datas are loaded into the application.

Yet no experiments with life savers (even if I assume, that it should be real simple the transmitting protocol). Unfortunately Medtronic doesn't care.

So unfortunately, it works until now within a Virtual Machine e.g. VirtualBox which comes with this license issue.